So, last night one of the most reliable members of the Tuesday night group, Chris, ran Ghost/Echo. Yes, I know: last night was Wednesday night. I started Art's Gaming Salon and Emporium of Tabletop Delights so that we could try one-shot or short-run games without interfering with the weekly Tuesday night game. Tuesday night is for longer-run, on-going games that usually last a few months to a even a year or more sometimes. The Gaming Salon is for once-a-month or so gaming experiments.
"Ghost/Echo is a quick-play aetherpunk adventure module [...]". That's what the website says, and that's a pretty good description. It's an rpg in the sense that there are rules for making characters and for task-resolution, and there is a structure for the kinds of things that are likely to happen. However, the rules as represented are built for one kind of adventure: the characters are looking for something in the ghost world and are ambushed because someone betrayed them and their are wraiths on their trail, too. How one interprets 'ghost world' and 'wraiths' and 'loot' and a lot of other things is pretty wide open, leaving the details of the characters and the world up to the players and gamemaster as they play. As a result, it requires a group of fairly mature people to keep it from becoming a free-for-all.
The Ghost/Echo site consists mostly of a free, two-page pdf with everything you need to play. It's not a complete game in the traditional sense, but there's enough dynamics in the rules that it would be really easy to use them to run any game in which substantial risk to the characters and their goals is desirable. This risk could be offset by increased use of the extra dice which the rules as written allow for in certain situations. I'd describe the rules more, but in the time it would take you'd be better off just reading the wee pdf. Heck, some of the two pages is filled by three very nice, evocative images, so it's even less that 2 pages. Check it out.
Thanks for reading!
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